Preface

Scattered across recipe cards, notebooks, random pieces of paper, and far, far too many cookbooks are the recipes that my family loves. Ones that we make time and time again and have since I was a child. Some recipes are attributed to one family member, as they are the ones who make that specific dish. If someone else were to try to make it, it somehow not be the same. Others are just recipes that we love so much, our go-to when we don’t know what to have for supper.

As my sisters and I get older and we start to move farther away from our childhood home, we are leaving behind the kitchen and table where we ate our meals together. That place where so many memories have been made and will still continue to be made, although not as often. I wanted to have all of the recipes that we so dearly love in one place so that even if we forget which of our many cookbooks held one specific recipe, we will still be able to find it here. Or, if the recipe card or notebook it is written in is becomes completely indecipherable, we still have the recipe it contained.

There will still be more recipes constantly being added to our list of favorites, or old recipes that we thought forgotten, remembered. We may have favorite recipes, but that doesn’t prevent us from experimenting and trying new foods, creating new favorites along the way.

At the back of this book, there is space intentionally left for new recipes to be written with that idea in mind. Although this the recipes printed here will not change, we can still add more as time goes marching onward.

It is my hope that this book will be well loved and used, that it may get stained and creased. That someone may use ripped bits of paper, receipts, or folded in half envelopes as bookmarks for their most used recipes. Or perhaps, new alterations will be written in its margins and notes about if someone really liked it. This is not meant to be something that sits in a box, but on a shelf. Ready to be grabbed, to be flipped through, and to have one of its many recipes picked out to be made.